Adventures in restoring & renovating our antique farmhouse

Busy Bees

Hey guys! So we welcomed 11,000 new buzzing besties to the yard this past weekend. What an adventure that was! I’ve been taking a beekeeping class and I am excited to finally be (mostly) over my lifelong fear of bees. Once these ladies have built up their hive, we can all look forward to lots of healthy, pollinated flowers and hopefully some Porter-Bradstreet honey 😊🐝.

Anyway, hello there, and Happy Spring! As usual, been having technical difficulties over here and very little time to troubleshoot. My computer is still toast. I dropped my phone while gardening last week and the screen is now smashed. Still kinda works though – which is how I’m doing this post now. With that said, servers and uploads (etc…I truly have no idea what is going on) are not being friendly so I am gonna do my best with the pictures. Also still getting over the worst spring flu ever. Not the best coupla weeks! But we are having a good time here on the farm and the really good news is that the house is moving right along…

The framing on the Back Of The House is done!

It is a really big space – bigger than I’d thought it would be. And most of that is just because it is now straight! Since the floor has been rebuilt straight on the first floor, it meant the sinking floor upstairs would make for too short of a ceiling back on the first floor. Consequently, correcting the floor height upstairs required pushing the roof up so that the ceiling on the second floor would not be too low. We are not talking “charming” low with all of this either…more like crouch-down-to-walk-around low. For example, without these adjustments, you can see the height the ceiling would be in the upstairs bathroom:

Not where the white part is – it would be lower than where the studs behind my head are in the picture. You can also see some corrected ceiling heights in these pictures…

Dining room downstairs:

New space upstairs:

So now this giant upstairs space has been filled in with more framing. The existing upstairs bathroom at the top of the back stairway was reframed and will be reconfigured. Enjoy the picture of our little cherubs, since I can’t find a suitable “before” picture at the moment!

Yes, we moved the window! There is also now a fourth bedroom at the top of the stairs, where a linen closet had been…

Behind the master bedroom, there is now a walk-in closet, small hallway and linen closet, and a master bathroom.

Looking toward what will be a master bath vanity:

Looking through hallway behind master bedroom, linen closet will be to the left, walk-in closet to the right, master bath behind me:

Downstairs, we now have a dining room and a den. We have also converted the separate Girls room and Boys room back into one bathroom with a storage closet outside.

Dining room, looking towards kitchen/basement stairs:

Basically turning in place from that picture is the den, facing from the dining room and towards the downstairs bathroom:

Downstairs bathroom:

This week, we decided we’ve been pretty lazy and that we really don’t have enough going on. So we got even more crazy and decided that we might as well go ahead and gut the kitchen. What can I say? It just felt right.

The kitchen was redone sometime mid-century so there were no visible signs of original features. We went back and forth on keeping the cabinets. They weren’t horrible, but also not in the greatest shape. Painting them seemed like it would realistically end up more work than it might be worth (remember – toddlers in the mix). The final decision to tear them out came when considering how there will be a pantry and new entryway at some point, and we would have to rework where a stove might go. So, to simplify (ha, really), out they came.

The ceiling did not have any really cool thick beams like we hoped it might, but instead just sets of two long boards nailed together going across the ceiling. These have been cut to line up evenly and Nick is going to wrap them in other wood and stain them so that we can create a rustic “exposed beam” look.

At the beginning of the week, Nick brought the news that under the kitchen linoleum, there just happened to unfortunately be other, more terrible linoleum, and not a really cool hardwood floor like we had hoped. Well fast forward two more layers of different linoleum and we reached the elusive bottom-level wood floor. At first glance, it looks fantastic and I want to keep it, but then came a bit more heartbreak – we may need to replace it. This is for several reasons, namely because only half of the kitchen actually has the wood floor, with the other half being a hodge-podge of planks and repurposed wood (you can see below one plank is even painted!) and it is falling apart around all the edges. Worst case scenario – we replace with actual hardwood and save what we can to be used for other things.

Now what could be done with all that ripped up linoleum, you might ask? Well it seems the girls have caught the repurposing bug…

It makes for a perfect fairy princess house rooftop and in-ground pool!

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4 Comments

You are such a saint for your patience with all these changes!!! The back does look huge and so worth it. And tell the girls that I love their little piece of linoleum paradise – especially the “palm trees” !!!!